2025-2026 Fall Colloquia

ABSTRACT: Devaluation theories posit that: 1) low-status work will be disproportionately allocated to low-status actors (such as women, relative to men); 2) work is devalued when low-status actors do it compared to when high-status actors do it; and 3) that tasks culturally associated with low-status actors will be devalued regardless of worker gender. These theories help explain gender inequalities in paid work but have not been empirically tested in the realm of unpaid work. Results from a survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of American adults (N=2,495) show that, consistent with prior theory, female-typed household tasks are devalued relative to male-typed household tasks. However, counter to prior theory, we find that household tasks completed by women are assessed as more valuable—and more personally costly—than the same tasks completed by men. These results indicate that gendered valuation processes operate differently in the realm of paid and unpaid work. Further, open-ended survey responses suggest that while Americans recognize the costs women incur through their unpaid labor, these costs may be seen as offset by the greater value women produce for their families.

ABSTRACT: Voters often rely on candidate gender to infer candidate traits, yet candidate qualifications such as career background can also trigger gender stereotypes. How might these qualifications help or hinder women candidates? I argue that the answer depends on stereotypes about specific elected offices. Rather than preferring masculinity overall, I propose that voters favor matched stereotypes, preferring feminine qualifications in feminine-coded races (e.g., school board) and masculine qualifications in masculine-coded races (e.g., mayor). To test this theory, I run a conjoint experiment varying hypothetical candidates’ gendered qualifications (occupation, community experience). Voters reward stereotype alignment, penalizing women candidates whose gendered qualifications do not match office stereotypes. However, Republican voters penalize women candidates (but not men candidates) with masculine occupations in masculine-coded (mayoral) races, perhaps due to prescriptive gender norms. These findings have implications for women’s upward mobility, especially as more women pursue masculine-coded careers, run in local elections, and seek higher office.

ABSTRACT: On Dec 10, 2025, Australia's Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA) Act goes into force. Social media platforms will be required to remove accounts that belong to individuals that are 16 years old or younger. This legislation will apply to the entire country of Australia in a world-first intervention on social media. The Stanford Social Media Lab is the Lead Academic Partner for the eSafety Commission tasked with evaluating the benefits and unintended consequences of this whole-society restriction on access to social media. Professor Hancock will describe the latest updates on the SMMA and the current plans for evaluating the legislation, including the challenges as well as the important opportunities for advancing the global conversation around social media, youth and well-being. One goal for the colloquium will be to identify some predictions about how this legislation may affect Australian youths and their families, highlighting how important this moment is-not just for Australia, but for the world watching.

Survey incentives are a common industry practice for boosting response rates, but their application is far from standardized. Researchers face a complex set of choices regarding an incentive's form (e.g., cash, voucher, or non-monetary gift), timing (prepaid vs. promised), and amount, with little clear guidance on how to maximize respondent participation while minimizing costs. This presentation synthesizes preliminary findings from a literature review of experimental research on survey incentives. It will highlight effective, evidence-based incentive choices and propose a decision-making framework to guide the selection of incentives in survey design.

Latino Americans have historically mobilized in response to anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, but what occurs when they increasingly adopt and express their American identity? Why do some Latinos hold anti-immigration attitudes that seem to conflict with a sense of shared group experience? This study extends Social Identity Theory by introducing social expression as a new stage in identity adoption. It examines how the comfort Latinos feel in expressing their American or Latino identity relates to their immigration policy preferences. The findings show that greater comfort expressing an American identity is associated with higher support for restrictive immigration policies, while expression of a Latino identity shows no consistent relationship with immigration attitudes. These results suggest that how Latinos express, rather than simply hold, their identities may carry important implications for understanding variation in Latino political behavior.

This talk will walk you through what it was like to hit the ground running in the survey research industry more than three decades ago, from telephone interviewer to Executive Vice President of a multi-million-dollar full-service research firm. I’ll share lessons learned from hands-on experience with various research methods, the importance of continuing education, attending conferences, and growing a network of mentors and experts in the field, as well as the benefits of volunteering and giving back to the research community.  My journey wouldn’t be complete without also sharing a little about myself and the challenges I faced which greatly impacted my career choices when pivoting personally and professionally. There are several references to resources that helped me along the way and new resources I helped author such as the recently released AAPOR report on Texting for Research: A Brief Guide to the Regulatory Environment and Operational Considerations. While moving through my 30-year career journey I learned in the moment how to adapt to a rapidly changing environment and to embrace, with caution, new technology and research methods.

An important driver of climate change inaction is the belief that individuals cannot have any tangible impact on climate change through their own actions. Currently available statistics are not suited to systematically assess or challenge this belief. In this paper, I derive the marginal impact of emission reductions – the effect of reducing emissions by 1 tonne of CO₂ (tCO₂) – on physical climate change outcomes, document important misperceptions, and show how they affect behavior. Using climate models, I find that the impact of reducing emissions by 1 tCO₂ is thousands of liters less glacier ice melting, several additional hours of aggregate life expectancy, and multiple m² less vegetation undergoing ecosystem change. Subjects underestimate these figures by orders of magnitude. Moreover, their mental model is inconsistent with climate models. First, they assume that the marginal impact increases when others reduce their emissions (strategic complementarity). Second, they think emission reductions are a threshold public goods game. Providing subjects with the climate scientific findings causally increases perceived self-efficacy, intentions to reduce emissions, and real donations to offset emissions. The misperceptions and treatment effect are consistent with a mental model of threshold thinking, which predicts positive overall emission reductions of information provision in equilibrium. Providing information about the marginal impact is a cost-effective demand-side mitigation strategy. The information can also serve as a catalyst for other climate policies by reframing their benefits and challenging arguments against unilateral action that are based on threshold thinking.

In recent years, city leaders, law enforcement, and news outlets have warned that digital social media-plattorms like Facebook, /witter, and Instagram-are amplifying the frequency and severity of urban violence. In turn, police departments and prosecutors increasingly rely on social media content to secure arrests, convictions, and sentences. Despite this development, however, there is surprisingly scant empirical data capable of disentangling the relationship between social media and violence. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork alongside gang-associated youth and their peer networks on Chicago's South Side, combined with interviews with attorneys and analyses of criminal court cases throughout the US, I propose a framework to begin understanding this relationship more systematically and sociologically. Integrating concepts from sociolinguistics and new media scholarship, I consider the process of "context collapse" as a key mechanism that (1) constrains and facilitates physical violence, and (2) provides law enforcement with new resources for punishing impoverished residents of color. More generally, these processes suggest the need for scholars to reconsider the role of social media-and the mechanism of context collapse-in transforming the processes and assumptions underlying many of our longstanding theories of interaction and inequality in urban life.

ABSTRACT: In order to change climate change, we need technologies that produce cheap, scalable, renewable energy. We are on the cusp of developing the technologies that move us away from fossil fuels for good. For instance, solar power is now the cheapest form of energy, and its cost has fallen 90% since 2010. Fusion energy is likely in the next 10-15 years. Geothermal and advanced nuclear are also going to scale soon. But technology can’t be the only solution. Remember, the problem of climate change is a direct consequence of technology (as are the other two existential threats: nuclear weapons and AI). People (and their politics) are the real problem and hence must be the solution. Technologies mean nothing if people do not adopt them and change their behaviors, attitudes, and lifestyles.  Social scientists—psychologists, sociologists, economists, and political scientists—play a critical role in this transition. We study people and what we know has to be applied to getting people the world over to adopt renewable energies—that is, to changing attitudes and behavior. Social scientists aren’t the only solution but are uniquely positioned to play an important role in this transition.